Date Calculator for Windows Version 2.0 Date Calculator is a program that performs a variety of calendar related functions, including a perpetual calendar, calculating the number of days between two dates, or the date of the day a certain number of days from a certain date. It also tells you the day of the week for a given date. Date Calculator is very flexible. You can set it to count only certain days of the week, such as Monday through Friday, and whether to count the first and last day of the date range provided. It will automatically calculate costs if you are paying a certain amount per day. It also has features to automatically input certain common dates, like today's date. These features are described below. Disclaimer Date Calculator is provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. It is the sole responsibility of the end user to determine the applicability, accuracy, and appropriateness of this program for your particular purposes. It is recommended that the new user do a few simple calculations by hand and match them with the results obtained using Date Calculator. This will the user to verify that the calculation being performed by Date Calculator is the operation the user expects Date Calculator to perform. This is to allow the user to confirm that they correctly understand exactly what operations are being performed in each calculation done by Date Calculator. Neither Leithauser Research nor David Leithauser is responsible for any damages resulting from the use or misuse of this program. Shareware Notice Date Calculator is distributed as shareware. This means that you can try it for one month to see if it fits your needs. If it does, you are required to pay for it by sending the registration fee of $25.00 (US) to David Leithauser Leithauser Research 4649 Van Kleeck Drive New Smyrna Beach, FL 32169-4205 If you do not pay the registration fee within 60 days of the time you start using it, Date Calculator will stop functioning until you pay the registration fee. For further instructions, click on the Register button on the opening title page. This will show the Register page with further instructions, and a Print button that will print a form you can mail in to register Date Calculator. When you pay for Date Calculator, you will receive the unlock code, which you can then input in the Register window. Installing Date Calculator in Windows To install Date Calculator on your disk, put all the files that come with Date Calculator in one place (a floppy disk or a directory on your hard disk). Then run the Setup program by using the Run option under the Start menu in Windows 95/98/NT or the Program Manager Files menu in Windows 3.1. Using Date Calculator When you run Date Calculator, you will see a screen full of controls and input boxes. Although these may seem confusing at first, they are really quite simple if you take a minute to familiarize yourself with them. The first control, found in the upper left corner, selects which function of Date Calculator you will be using. These functions are calculating the number of days between two dates, calculating the date of a date of the day a given number of days from a given date, and calculating the date of a day a given number of days before a given date. You can click on the operation you want to choose with a muse to select it. The default (the one Date Calculator has selected when you first run it) is to calculate the number of days between two dates. These operations are explained below. Calculating days between dates When you are performing this operation, you will see input boxes for Start Date, End Date, and Cost/Day. You would input the date you want to start counting from in the Start Date box and the last date to count in the End Date box. You can input dates in a variety of formats, such as Jan. 1, 1999 or 1-1-99 or 1/1/1999. There is an advantage for non-US users to use three letter month abbreviations, because it insures that the program is using the correct date. Using non-US formats, such as Day-Month-Year, could cause confusion on some computers. Incidentally, Date Calculator has a few time saving features for inputting data such as dates. These will be explained later. If you are calculating expenses, you can input a value in the Cost/Day box. If you do this, Date Calculator will not only calculate the number of days, but also the total cost. You may notice when you input a date in the Start Date or End Date box that a day of the week appears next to that date. Date Calculator automatically calculates the day of the week for the date in the input box (and also for dates generated by calculations). As you are typing in the date manually, you may notice this day of the week changing. This is because Date Calculator is calculating the day for date as it currently appears. If you are typing 12-12-99, for example, a day will appear when you have gotten to 12-1 as Date Calculator calculates the day for December 1, but will change when you type in the following 2. Just ignore the day of the week displayed until you have input the entire date. In the top middle of the Date Calculator form there are check boxes to allow you to include the first or last day of the date range. For example, if you have a start date of Jan. 1, 1999 and an end date of 1/1/2000, Date Calculator will count Jan. 1, 1999 if the Start Date box is checked and will count 1/1/2000 if the End Date is checked. You can check both boxes if you want to count both dates. The default is to count only the start date. In the upper right corner is a powerful option to allow you to select which days of the week to count. You can put a check in the day for each day you want to count. (The default is all days.) For example, if you wanted to count all the days between today and January 1, 2000, you would have all the days of the week checked. If, however, you only want to count work days between those two dates, you would click on the Saturday and Sunday boxes to remove the checks from those boxes. Date Calculator would then count the week days between those two dates. If you wanted to count the number of weeks between two dates, you could simply check any one day of the week. There are shortcut buttons at the bottom of the frame containing the check boxes to help you quickly select common configurations, such as week days. Note that although Date Calculator has a None button there, this is only to help you quickly clear the check boxes if you only what to check one or two days. Date Calculator will not do any calculation if no day boxes are checked. When you have set all the fields the way you want them, click on the Calculate button (or press the ENTER button on your keyboard) to perform the calculation. After performing one calculation, you can simply change the data in the input boxes and click on the Calculate button to do the calculation again. Calculating End Date and Start Date The calculation of the End Date allows you to input a Start Date and a number of days, and Date Calculator will calculate the date at the end of that number of days. The calculation of the Start Date is the same process, except that it counts backward. For these operations, you need to input the Start Date (or End Date) and the number of days to count forward (or backward). With these operations, the check boxes for counting the Start Date and the End Date disappear. Date Calculator automatically does not count the start date but does count the end date in this calculation. The selection of which days of the week to count affects the operations to find the End and Start Date. Suppose you want to find the date when 100 working days have passed after today. You can input today's date into the Start Date, 100 into the Days box, and uncheck the Saturday and Sunday boxes in the "Count" frame. This will give you a different result (a later date) than if you had all the days of the week counted. Likewise, you would get an earlier date if you calculated the Start date (the date a number of days before the End Date) using only week days instead of all days. Some people like to find a whole series of End (or Start) Dates based on a common sequence of numbers of days. For example, some people want to know the dates 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and 34 days after a certain Start Date. To simplify this process Date Calculator allows you to input a sequence of numbers separated by commas in the Days box. For example, you could input "2,3,5,8,13,21" (without the quotation marks) in the Days box. If you do this, each time you hit the Calculate button, Date Calculator will calculate the next date in the sequence. For example, if you input Jan. 1, 1999 as the start date and 3,5,8 in the Days box, clicking the Calculate button once would give you Jan. 4, 1999. Clicking it again would give you Jan. 6, 1999. Clicking it again would give you Jan. 9, 1999. If the Print box (explained below) is checked, you do not have to press the Calculate button repeatedly. Date Calculator will calculate and print all the dates immediately. If you have a series of numbers you use often, you can store this sequence of numbers in Date Calculator, as will be explained later. Printing your results Below the frame containing the check boxes for the days to count is a single check box marked Print. If this box is checked, a full description of the calculation and its results will be sent to the printer. If this printer function is turned on, Date Calculator will not pause when doing repetitive calculations, such as all the End Dates in a series, as explained above. When you do a calculation with the Print box checked, Date Calculator will print the results and eject the paper from your printer immediately. Since it uses a full sheet of paper for each calculation, you might want to use the Print option only on a calculation you really want to save the results of. Time saving features Date Calculator has a number of features that save you time when inputting commonly used data. You can input Today's date, the date January 1, 2000, or the third Friday of any month if the year into either the Start Date or End Date box with a click of the mouse. First, click on the date box (Start Date or End Date) where you want the date to go. Then, to input today's date, click on the Today button. To input the date January 1, 2000 (useful for counting down to the Y2K bug), click on that button. To input the date of the third Friday of any month, click on the input box where you want to input the date. Then click on that month in the list box next to the January 1, 2000 button. (You may have to scroll through the list box for months late in the year.) If you select a month that has already passed in the current year, the date you get will be for that month next year. This feature is particularly useful to option traders, because it saves the time of looking up the date of the third Friday of a given month. Normally, you would use this feature to input today's date into the Start Date box and either January 1, 2000 or the third Friday of a month into the End Date box. To save you the trouble of inputting a long series of numbers every time you want to do an End Date or Start Date calculation on a sequence of numbers, you can store up to three sequences of numbers. To do this, click on the Define Sequence on the top of the form. To input the first sequence, click on the Sequence 1 item. An input box will appear. You can input the sequence of numbers, separated by commas, into the input box. For example, you could input "3,5,8,13,21" (without the quotation marks). Then click on the Ok button. This will store the sequence you have input on your hard disk. If you have already input a sequence, the existing sequence will appear in the input box when it first appears. This allows for easy changes. You also can delete all the numbers in the input box and Click on Ok to delete a sequence. If you have already saved a sequence 1, you also will have the option of inputting a sequence 2. Click on the Define Sequence on the top of the form. To input the second sequence, click on the Sequence 2 item. If you have already saved a sequence 2, you can then input a sequence 3. Click on the Define Sequence on the top of the form. To input the third sequence, click on the Sequence 3 item. Once you have stored a Sequence 1, 2, or 3, any time you are calculating an End Date or Start Date, a button for that sequence will appear under the Days input box. Clicking on this button will put the entire sequence into the Days box. Then you can just click on the Calculate button and see the entire sequence of End Days, as explained above. Perpetual Calendar You can see a calendar of any month of any year by clicking on the Calendar option on the top menu. A form will appear that allows you to select the month and year you want a calendar for. You can select the month from the pick list on the left. You can select a year from 1998 to 2100 from the pick list on the right, or type a year in the text box on top of the pick list. Then click on the Ok button. The calendar for that month and year will appear. Click on the Ok button to return to the main Date Calculator window. Bug reports and suggestions Reports of problems or suggestions for improvement are welcome. Send such reports or suggestions to: David Leithauser Leithauser Research 4649 Van Kleeck Drive New Smyrna Beach, FL 32169 You also can leave EMAIL on America Online, addressed to Leithauser, or on CompuServe to 74046,1556. You also can send Internet EMAIL to Leithauser@aol.com. In cases of emergency, you can call Leithauser Research at (904) 423-0705 between the hours of 10 AM and 6 PM ET. If I feel that the improvement would be of interest to most users, I will make it for free and send you the improved version. If the improvement is unusual and suited only to your specific needs, I can give you a price quote for a customized version of Date Calculator (see below). Custom programming The primary function of Leithauser Research is custom programming. If you would like a custom program of any type written, please contact me at the above address for Leithauser Research. Describe the program you would like written in as much detail as possible and I will give you a price estimate. Programs can be DOS or Windows. Online shopping On an unrelated subject, if you like shopping from the convenience of your keyboard, check out the EasyShop Online Shopping Mall at http://members.aol.com/EasyShop. It has over 30 stores with a wide variety of goods and services that you can order online and have delivered to your door. It even has several dating services where you can meet your match.